More than a Game: Embodied Everyday Anti-Racism among Young Filipino-Australian Street Ballers

Abstract

This paper explores marginalisation experienced in mainstream basketball by young Filipino-Australian men from Sydney's western suburbs. Sharing findings from a larger ethnographic study undertaken with Filipino immigrants in Sydney on experiences of everyday racism and resistance, this paper uses a biographical account to examine intricate connections between lives and racialising social processes. In sporting contexts, the body and its comportment provide the sites for domination and resistance. The analysis applies Bourdieu's concept of habitus to examine how broad racial formations are embodied in mainstream basketball. Furthermore, this paper examines the ways in which the playing style of 'street ball' is used to engage with corporeality as a mode of everyday anti-racism.

The right to the city: outdoor informal sport and urban belonging in multicultural spaces

“…Racial slurs on the court and field still commonly occur. Tensions can also emerge across ethnic differences due to a lack of socialisation into organised club sports linked to rule following and differing expectations around player etiquette (Aquino, 2015;Burdsey 2010;Carniel, 2009). Ethno-specific clubs can increase access to club management positions for migrants.…”

“…That is, aside from gaining physical health benefits and getting some emotional respite from their everyday struggles, migrant workers' bodies are able to physically transform from laboring bodies into creative and carefree bodies through social and pleasurable play where the outdoors offer a 'safe haven' (Rishbeth & Rogaly, 2018) to take some control over their lives. Informal sporting play, cultivated in informal sites where rules and playing space are modified, can generate unconventional, yet skilful and creative performances that enable ingenuity in the face of marginality (see Aquino, 2015;Neal et al, 2019). Male participants in Yishun regularly described their participation in informal games as making them feel "relief", "feeling free", "feeling at peace" and turning into "someone different as soon as I step on court".…”

Imagining a multicultural community in an everyday football carnival: Chants, identity and social resistance on Western Sydney terraces

“…There is a similarity here between the carnivalesque bodies of the RBB supporters and the body culture of the Filipino-Australian basketballers studied by Aquino (2015: 172); members of both groups lack the 'rationalised and controlled' body demanded by the gatekeepers of modern sport. Australian basketball representative and professional teams, it seems, do not admit Filipino-Australians for the same reason that the police try to restrict the movements of the RBB carnival on the streets of Western Sydney; their body culture does not conform to white middle class expectations of corporeal behaviour (Aquino, 2015) and they do not behave according to certain norms of 'right' Australianness, such as minimal noise-levels, limited body contact with other fans and limited movement on the stands (Wise, 2010). The unruly dancing bodies of the RBB challenge these norms; their bodily dispositions 'cannot be fixed in "Australian values"' (Harris, 2013: 144).…”